Yesterday, thanks to the miracle of zoom, I was able to attend the celebration at the University of Massachusetts commemorating the 50th anniversary of a program I started there in 1972 – 73, called Social Thought and Political Economy, or as the UMass computer immediately rendered it, STPEC. STPEC began as an edgy left-wing version of the Social Studies program I headed up at Harvard in 1960 – 61 during its first year and my last year as an instructor there. Over the past half-century, close to 2000 young men and women have majored in STPEC at UMass, and it is a first rate program now emphasizing community activism as well as campus study.
I particularly wanted to appear at the commemoration of the
program because I wanted to tell the folks there that in one particular respect it is quite unlike the other
undergraduate interdisciplinary programs with which I have been familiar, such
as the Contemporary Civilization program at Columbia, which began in 1919 and
continues to this day, or the old Hutchins University of Chicago program, in
the last iteration of which I taught during my three years there. At Columbia,
Chicago, and Harvard, faculty got together and decided what students ought to
study and then offered it to them to take it or leave it. But at UMass,
something rather different happened.
My original idea was to have students take courses drawn
from a variety of departments and then top that off with a senior year seminar
jointly taught by two professors from different departments (thus institutionalizing
the interdisciplinary character of the program.) After several years, there
were enough juniors about to be seniors in the program, so I got together with
William Connolly, a bright professor in the political science department, and
the next year, in 1976- 77, we taught the first STPEC senior seminar.
Bill and I were having a great time teaching a very
demanding senior seminar when some students came to see me in my office. They
were juniors in the program who had been talking to the seniors in our seminar
and they told me that they did not think the courses they had been taking
prepared them for that kind of demanding senior capstone course. Was there
something I could do to prepare them better for the senior seminar? Well, I
thought about it for a bit and went to the Provost to ask for a little bit of
money. I used it to buy the time of a hotshot young political science professor
at Mount Holyoke College named Tracey Strong, who was delighted to have the
opportunity to teach a course on the classic texts of social theory.
Tracey devised a very demanding course and after he started
teaching it, some students came to see me. They were sophomores in the STPEC program
and they had been talking to the juniors taking the junior seminar. They did
not think that their introductory level courses in various departments had
prepared them for that kind of seminar and they wanted to know whether there
was something I could do about it. After thinking about it for a bit I created
a new course in the Philosophy Department at the introductory level called
Introduction to Social Philosophy.
This was the only instance I had ever seen in which the
curricular structure of an undergraduate program was determined not by what the
faculty thought the students should study, but by what the students told the
faculty they needed and wanted.
In 1980, my first wife, who was a professor in the UMass
English department, was offered a professorship at MIT so we moved from
Northampton to Belmont and I started commuting back three days a week to UMass.
Now, as I am sure many of you know, being a senior professor at a university is
not a very demanding job so I had no trouble satisfying my departmental
requirements on parts of three days a week but I could not very well run the
STPEC program that way, so I looked around for someone to take over from me. I
found a wonderful young woman in the German department named Sara Lennox who
was about to get tenure and was very excited by the thought of running this
program rather than teaching German for the rest of her life. Sara, who was of
course at the celebration meeting, then ran STPEC for 31 years, preserving the
tradition of student input into the shape and direction of the program and
making it an enormous success.
As I told those who were gathered at yesterday’s meeting,
like all people of my age I am happy to take credit for everything I did half a
century ago if it has turned out well, as in this case it clearly has. It was a
wonderful opportunity for me to see what has become of one of my favorite bits
of academic creativity and I am enormously grateful to whoever invented zoom
for the opportunity.
19 comments:
How do you form the professors to teach the course?
I had the required Contemporary Civilization and Humanities courses as a freshman at Columbia.
They drafted people from all the social sciences department to teach Contemporary Civilization. I had an economist, who may have been a brilliant man in his specialized field, but just didn't have the breadth of philosophical knowledge required for the course. I was only a freshman who had read some survey texts on philosophy, but at times I sensed I knew more than he did.
In Humanities I had a nice guy, who was a playwright, but again did not seem to know all that much about Greek and Roman literature, which was the focus of the course.
In the second year I had music and art humanities, and since I knew I lot less about music and art than I did about literature and social thought/philosophy, I learned quite a bit from them, but that was a reflection of my original ignorance on the subject.
I then took an non-obligatory Humanities course (modern literary masterpieces) and by chance got Edward Said (who was not famous then) and that was a lot better, but there are very few people around with the breadth of reading and intellectual curiosity that Said had.
I know you, Professor Wolff, have widely read in many fields, but most university professors are not all that knowledgeable outside of their specialized area of study.
I think Prof Wolff is putting an interesting spin on this story.
The UMass students told him they were not being *sufficiently prepared* for what the faculty was asking of them, but there is no evidence in Prof Wolff's post that the students had input into the specific content or syllabi of, say, the T. Strong course on classics of social theory or his course on Intro to Social Philosophy.
It's nice that the students were listened to and their concerns were addressed, but it's not as if they had input into the substance of the syllabi and that might not even have made sense.
P.s. Or if they did have such input, the post does not say that.
P.p.s. Prof Wolff also implies that Social Studies, in contrast to STPEC, was not "left wing." Maybe it wasn't in 1960, when it was created, but by the late 1970s, which is the period I can speak to from personal experience, it did have something of a leftward tilt. Not drastic, and certainly not all the students or faculty were leftists (or left-liberals), but it was there.
One of the most interesting aspects of the story, if I understand it, is how the students treated the senior seminar as a given goal, and one they wished to reach. My own experience was much more than students would either refuse to take the seminar seriously (for example, when I taught a graduate seminar in Art Practice at Stanford, after the first meeting one of the students approached me and helpfully informed me that neither he nor any of the other students were going to do any work for it), or demand that it be abolished.--I always did what I could to treat any syllabus as provisional and subject to revision in light of any student requests or emergent interests. The most successful such one was when I was called in to teach a class on 'Performativity', literally hours before the scheduled first meeting. The downside was that I had to break my deeply-sworn vow to never again read Judith Butler; the upside was when after a few weeks a student who I greatly liked told me he had no interest whatsoever in any performance by any white person. So I took the opportunity to re-orient the class to the study of James Brown; we all had a blast, and I learned a great deal. There's a way of teaching, and not uncommon, where you're only hours ahead of the students. So the class basically became the study of and reflection upon this (apparently in the late 50s Brown would spend up to 45 minutes on this shtick): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vruy2GRUsV8&ab_channel=JamesBrown
@ John Rapko
It would have been surprising if the students hadn't treated the senior seminar that way. At the time, according to the post, it was the key distinguishing feature of a program that they had chosen to be in and were presumably motivated to be in.
We're not talking here about embryonic artists rebelling against a requirement to read aesthetic theory or something like that, but rather about undergrads in an interdisciplinary social-sciences program -- a very different context.
LFC--Of course you are right. But my remarks were meant to point to a couple of things: (a, uncontroversially) The students were 'self-selectively' in the program, and carried into college an ethos whereby (i) challenges were welcome when they were posed by (ii) authorities that they themselves acknowledged as legitimate and orienting, and this is indeed a highly specific context; and (b, controversially) such conditions or contexts are rare in contemporary undergraduate academics.--In practice contemporary academic students' (or administrators') demand for 'relevance' is a cousin to the art students' refusal. As an academic administrator said to me, "Why do you think teaching Aristotle is relevant to our students in your ethics class?"
Clarification:
The original post above compares the program at Harvard and at UMass to Columbia's Contemporary Civilization program, so without reflecting much, I dashed off a criticism of the Columbia CC program without realizing that it doesn't apply to the Harvard or UMass programs.
All entering freshmen have to take CC, so you need a lot of professors to cover that area and thus, have to draft people from other social science disciplines, who often do not have sufficient general cultural background to do justice to the ideal of the program.
The economics professor who taught me CC did not necessarily know more than I, a freshman who had read a lot of history on his own during high school, about the protestant reformation.
The programs at Harvard and at UMass, I now realize, are not obligatory for all students and thus, it is not impossible to find a small number of professors with the general background necessary to teach them well.
s. wallerstein--
A close friend of mine taught in the Columbia program in the early-mid 1980s. She once told me that she enjoyed it, and (like me in teaching art history or world philosophy) used it as an opportunity to learn about works and plug some of the holes in her general learning.
John Rapko,
A close friend of yours is most probably similar to you, open to exploring new areas of the world and of knowledge, wandering through new intellectual and artistic terroritories, but most academics are basically interested in advancing up the ladder of academic status and promotion within their own specific field.
s.w.
I don't know exactly how Columbia staffs CC today but I wouldn't assume it's staffed in the same way it was when you were an undergraduate.
My guess, which I'd have to confirm, is that at least some of the people who teach CC are hired on contract specifically to do that.
Harvard staffs Social Studies now largely by hiring PhDs specifically to teach in the program. They're full time, called lecturers in Harvard's lingo, but not tenure track. Another avenue is that they hire, or have in the past, assistant professors with joint appointments in, say, Government and Social Studies or History and Social Studies etc. At least some of those people have gone on to get tenure in their respective departments.
It's true that most academics are necessarily specialists but that doesn't mean you can't find people suited to teach in programs of this sort, whether interdisciplinary or more like whatever you want to call CC (humanities, the "canon", great books, whatever). I would be extremely surprised if Columbia these days would "draft" an economist to teach intro world history. In the mid-1960s there was not a surplus of PhDs. Now there is. It's a completely different world.
I have a question about interdisciplinarity. I think that there is hardly any doubt how important it is that sciences, no matter whether arts, humanities or natural sciences understand each other, or at least cultivate misunderstandings, which means to let them become fruitful.
The specialism, i.e. the seemingly infinite splitting of the subject area of research into ever finer fractals with a constantly increasing resolution, I wonder how high the demands on interdisciplinary studies would have to be in order to take this into account.
LFC,
CC was not world history. It was based on a 2 volume anthology of excerpts from classics of social, political and ethical thought from the Greeks to the 19th century.
There was not much emphasis on the historical content and still less on the deep social and economic forces which shape history.
s.w.
You mentioned above that you knew as much or more about the Protestant Reformation as the economist teaching one of the courses - that what's prompted my remark about history.
typo s/b that's
feeling under the weather at the moment so will probably bow out.
LFC,
That all took place 60 years ago and I don't have the world's best memory for what I was supposed to have learned in school, but we must have read Luther's 95 Theses or some document of that type.
I hope that you feel better soon.
W/r/t the hardest-working man in show business, I went to bed last night wondering, who could be considered the “white” equivalent to James Brown? I think the answer may have be: “Liberace”. (No, I’m not kidding.)
I also considered Frank Zappa, but then I remembered George Duke pointing out to an interviewer that FZ—obviously enough—was not really “white” (see also: Johnny Otis).
In any event, that student put his finger on something well worth examining.
s.w.
Thank you.
Insofar as this post (and associated commentary) concerns (1) U Mass, (2) “white performance”, and (3) undergrad seminars, I feel the need to direct everyone's attention to the words of distinguished U Mass alumnus Charles Michael Kittridge Thompson IV, as expressed in one of the greatest “college rock” numbers of all time:
In the sleepy West of the woody East
Is a valley full, full of pioneer
We're not just kids, to say the least
We got ideas to us that's dear
Like “Capitalism” … like “Communism”…
Like, lots of things ... you've heard about
And redneckers/ They get us PISSED!
And stupid stuff/ It makes us SHOUT!
Oh dance with me/ Oh don't be shy!
Oh kiss me cunt/ Oh kiss me cock …
Oh kiss the world/ Oh kiss the sky …
Oh kiss my ass/ Oh let it ROCK!
Of the April birds/ And the May bee …
Oh BAY-BEE!
IT'S EDUCATIONAL! [Repeat x8]
University/ Of Massachusetts, please
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